Richard Dawkins Quotes

Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.

To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.

It's about time we start criticizing faith.

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.

Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.

The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.

Human beings are just gene machines.

With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.

Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.

Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it's a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.

‎"Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.

The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.

The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.

Religious people are atheists about all other gods, atheists only take it one god further.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

To fill a world with ... religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

My love of truth and honesty forces me to notice that the liberal intelligentsia of Western countries is betraying itself where Islam is concerned.

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth.

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

Undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance.

THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.

[Alternative medicine is defined as] that set of practices that cannot be tested, refuse to be tested or consistently fail tests.

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Offense is what people take when they can't take argument.

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.

I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.

...I am not attacking any particular God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, whenever or wherever they have been or will be invented.